Cmis Drive [EXPERIMENTAL]

Mount a CMIS repository into Finder. This is work in progress about how to mount a CMIS repository as FUSE Filesystem and using the FinderSync API to add context menus. Currently only Mac OS X supported.

Prerequisites:

FUSE installed

For now the FinderSync extension to add context menus need to be started manually from the Xcode project

Techniques used:

javafs to mount an java.nio.Filesystem as FUSE drive (uses JNR for native calls)

liferay-nativity to add context menus to finder

Projects:

"sho.cmis.fs" contains the CMIS Filesystem which is an implementation of java.nio.file.FileSystem (and its Provider).

"sho.cmis.drive" mount the CMIS Filesystem with javafs and initializes Nativity

Difficulties

1. Finder wants to create thumbnails for specific file types (I guess for those we have a Quicklook Plugin registered ?) This results in READ requests to those files (e.g. JPGs), which in turn results to a CMIS call "getContent". This can lower the performance significantly (e.g. if we have very many big image files in a directory).
   • We can turn off icon previews by selecting the CMIS Mount and pressing 'CMD+J' -> Uncheck 'Show icon preview'. This needs to be done by the user manually!
   • We can store the files in a cache folder so that they only need to be downloaded once. In this case we need to handle TTL, Max Cache Size, etc
   • I am not sure but I heard that the .DS_Store file maybe can handle/control icon previews of a folder. If so we could create a .DS_store file for the folders automatically (needs research in .DS_Store file format)
2. Multi-Thread access to CMIS Filesystem via FUSE: Calls to the CMIS Java Filesystem implementation are done often from multiple different threads. In order that these calls do not always result in a remote call we need to have a thread-safe cache implementation which encapsulates and protects from remote calls. It is also possible to start FUSE in a single-thread mode (parameter '-s').
3. TypeDefinitionCache?

Screenshots